Adobe Photoshop (cs5) Help!

[killem2]

I am making proxies to replace my real versions of magic the gathering cards so they may be left at my local shop for people to draft with, I need help making a template that I can easily swap out 9 cards when I'm ready to print another sheet.

Here is an example of one of the cards:

Its like 300-315 dpi, and when printed it SHOULD be:

63 x 88 mm

(2.5 by 3.5 inches)

6.3 x 8.8 cm

So it should have no issue fitting 9 of them, with room to cut on a 8.5x11 sheet of matte photo paper.

However, I have 720-740 cards I will be spitting out through my inkjet.

I have adobe photoshop cs3 and I have illustrator (though I really have not dug into it much)

What's the best course of action to handle this?

 

[DarkStarr]

Photoshop should be fine, you need to make a sheet sized image and lay out the cards on it in photoshop. Either way, using AI or PS it will be VERY time consuming, personally, I would setup the card then put one sheets worth into a folder and do the same until I have them all ready. That way you just turn the folders on and off to print them quickly.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'll ping Jamie about this, because he'll be able to help for sure. He's dealing with a lot of things at the moment though so he might not be able to tackle it right away.

 

[Kougar]

Dark's suggestion sounds good to me. If you pre-define the grids on a paper-sized page template, you can just quickly drop in the cards you want to use. Photoshop allows this when creating a new workpage.

When it comes to cutting them they will already be lined up allowing easy slicing, if ya have one of those large stack paper slicers available.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

This is what's referred to as 'imposition'.

There are a whole mass of ways to deal with this, it depends upon how accurate you want the prints to be, and how much time you want to sink in. BTW, When you print and crop to an image with no bleed, you'll be left with a white border from the paper. To get round this, we use something called bleed, which is an extension to the image past the cropped area, so when it comes to cropping the image, you'll cutoff the excess image and be left with a clean line. Also, bleed is a good way to absorb some of the alignment issues with printing.

And while technically, yes, photoshop can do this with ease, it suffers a multitude of other problems, but most of them centre around colour (cmyk, pantone, hexachrome, etc). InDesign would actually be a better choice for this, it's more accurate, has printing tools built into it like crop marks, bleed, link management, etc. Actually, i just made a few edits to an old template of mine and all you need to do is relink the images to whatever you want - IF you have ID... Just select one of the 9 cards, go to the Link panel, click the drop down, select 'relink' and choose the next image. If the image is poorly scaled, right click the image, goto fitting, and select 'fill frame proportionally'. Crop marks are already setup, etc, so it's just a few clicks.

View attachment 63x88_9upA4.zip

If you plan to print on both sides, then you'll run into alignment issues, so it may be best to just run with either a blank or unbordered background.

I'll see to making a PS/AI template if you don't have ID, it's just placing images are more awkward in them since they love to play around with scale for no reason.

EDIT: Zip now contains the AI file. Just go to the link panel, and relink file to change image. Again, crop marks included.

 

[killem2]

Wow thanks guys. I'll try those out. I don't have In design, but I'm sure I can get a trial that will work long enough to get what I need done.